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Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Making the Invisible Visible: Using Science to Show the Value of New Hampshire's Natural Resources

When you think of New Hampshire, it’s hard not to think of the scenes
of natural beauty—from the Seacoast to the White Mountains. Indeed, 80
percent of the state’s geographical area is covered by trees. Then there
are its 1,000 lakes, and its 100,000 miles of rivers and streams, which
supply the drinking water of 200,000 households. Nature is the reason
people—tourists—come here. And nature is the reason that many of
them–residents–stay.

But New Hampshire is currently beset by two forces that threaten our
quality of life, and the state’s own image of itself: Climate change on
the one hand, and growing urbanization on the other. Climate change is
taking a whack at one of the chief outdoor recreational industries here:
skiing. A warmer climate threatens to turn more than half
of New Hampshire ski resorts into money losers, according to a recent
study. And then there’s urbanization. As recent reports by New
Hampshire’s own Carsey Institute make clear,
our population is increasing, especially in the state’s southern
counties. That’s because people are migrating here, driven by the
quality of life and recreational splendor that we’re so known for. And
with that population comes increasing urbanization—housing developments
built amid forests, strip malls constructed to service it all.

All of which raises the question: “How much is too much?” Or as Cameron Wake,
a climate researcher in the Department of Earth Sciences at the
University of New Hampshire puts it: “How much can we develop, and still
keep clean water, and clean air, and areas to recreate, and wood for
timber, and areas for agriculture?”

That’s the challenge that New Hampshire has taken on, with a 5 year, $ 20 million grant
from the National Science Foundation’s EPSCoR program (Experimental
Program to Stimulate Competitive Research). The goal is to learn more
about how to manage the state’s natural resources, so that population
growth and development proceed in a sustainable fashion, without
threatening the quality of life that makes New Hampshire such a
desirable place to live and visit. This EPSCoR program runs a statewide
network of ecological sensors that monitor forest quality, water
quality, soil quality, snow behavior, and more. And now, researchers are working to design
ecological and economic models that will use this body of data to show
the consequences of a variety of land use changes for the state.

A critical benefit of this research will be to demonstrate the true
value, monetary and otherwise, of natural resources to the people of New
Hampshire. Scientists call it “ecosystem services”: Nature provides
people with any number of benefits, from clean drinking water to the
aesthetics of a landscape. But these benefits often aren’t measured or
included in traditional economic models that are crammed with data on
jobs, housing development, wages. That’s what the research will change.

“The payoff is making the invisible visible,” says Wake, “so people
incorporate the understanding of these ecosystem services into their
thinking.”

At present, the science is not yet at a place where it is possible to
pop out a simulation that directly tells policymakers whether or not
to, say, go ahead on a particular zoning project. But that’s the
direction in which things are headed—and some of the possibilities are
quite impressive. For instance, Kevin Gardner, associate director of New
Hampshire EPSCoR, describes a scenario in which the research can even
begin to help us value something seemingly hard to measure, like a
“viewshed”: to assess the value of an untrammeled landscape when
glimpsed from a particular place, and calculate how much that is harmed
if you put in an interstate or a transmission tower.

It’s good news—not bad—that people want to come and live in New
Hampshire. And this influx often includes highly skilled workers, for
instance in the tech industry, who help contribute to our economy.
Nobody’s knocking that. But as the state grows, improving the way in
which we assess our impact on nature grows more and more vital. Making
visible the natural world’s contributions to our quality of life means
nothing less than envisioning a better future.